Determining a size and demographics of an audience of a media presentation helps media providers and distributors schedule programming and determine a price for advertising presented during the programming. In addition, accurate estimates of audience demographics enable advertisers to target advertisements to certain types and sizes of audiences. To collect these demographics, an audience measurement entity enlists a plurality of media consumers (often called panelists) to cooperate in an audience measurement study (often called a panel) for a predefined length of time. The media consumption habits and demographic data associated with these enlisted media consumers are collected and used to statistically determine the size and demographics of the entire audience of the media presentation. In some examples, this collected data (e.g., data collected via measurement devices) may be supplemented with survey information, for example, recorded manually by the presentation audience members.
The process of enlisting and retaining participants for purposes of audience measurement is often a difficult and costly aspect of the audience measurement process. For example, participants are typically carefully selected and screened for particular characteristics so that the population of participants is representative of the overall presentation population. Additionally, the participants are required to perform specific tasks that enable the collection of the data, such as, for example, periodically self-identifying while consuming media programming.